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 fall, while you were perched up on the top row with a bunch of newspaper reporters, in the rain?”

“You didn’t go up for Prom Week.”

“Because Hank wouldn’t let me. But I’ll be there next year, and you can haul out the family sock on it.”

“Oh, shut up for a while,” her brother said wearily. “Maybe some of these ladies want to talk some.”

And there was the tug, squatting at her cables, breaking the southern horizon with an effect of abrupt magic, like a stereopticon slide flashed on the screen while you had turned your head for a moment.

“Look at that boat,” said Mark Frost, broaching. Mrs. Maurier directly behind him, shrieked:

“It’s the tug!” She turned and screamed down the companionway: “It’s the tug: the tug has come!” The others all chanted “The tug! The tug!” Major Ayers exclaimed dramatically and opportunely:

“Ha, gone away!”

“It has come at last,” Mrs. Maurier shrieked. “It came while we were at lunch. Has any one—” She roved her eyes about. “The captain— Has he been notified? Mr. Talliaferro—?”

“Surely,” Mr. Talliaferro agreed with polite alacrity, mounting the stairs and disintegrating his members with expedition, “I’ll summon the captain.”

So he rushed forward and the others came on deck and stared at the tug, and a gentle breeze blew offshore and they slapped intermittently at their exposed surfaces. Mr. Talliaferro shouted: “Captain! oh, Captain!” about the deck: he screamed it into the empty wheelhouse and returned. “He must be asleep,” he told them.

“We are off at last,” Mrs. Maurier intoned, “we can get off